Posted
by
timothyon Friday June 24, 2011 @07:58PM
from the your-session-has-expired-please-log-in dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Most of us know the many problems with electronic voting systems. They are closed source and hackable, some have a default candidate checked, and many are unauditable (doing a recount is equivalent to hitting a browser's refresh button). But these issues only come to our attention around election time. Now is the time to think about opensourcevoting, end-to-end auditable voting systems and opensourcegovernance. Not in November of 2012, when it will, once again, be far, far too late to do anything about it." It'll be interesting to see what e-voting oddities start cropping up in the current election cycle; Republican straw polls have already started, and the primaries kick off this winter.

Those of us who know and care -- and I don't mean me, I mean people like Dr Rebecca Mercuri, whose postgrad work has been right on this point -- have been trying to get that to happen since, oh, at least 1996 or so.

The e-voting system I've suggested a few times (anonymous generation of private/public key pairs issued to those who have ID) would make the showing of ID superfluous. You can vote with an invalid encryption key if you like, but there's bugger all the voting computer can do with it as it can't decrypt it. This also avoids the objections (which are valid) by individuals who have complained excessive ID requirements make voting impossible (in violation of the Federal laws on voting, not to mention the 15th Am

No voting system is democratic if it is not auditable by any member of the electorate.

You can create a complex machine voting system that I can understand, that I can prove is correct, and that I am happy to trust. But then 99% of the electorate have to trust me or people like me with their vote. This is no different than asking them to trust any other arbitrarily selected 1% of the population to cast their vote for them.

If you are required to show ID when you vote then the only valid ID should be a voter card they issue you free of charge when you register to vote.

The reason that Republicans want you to show ID when you vote is to suppress the voting of people who are more likely to vote for Democrats. The level of voter fraud, that is people who are not eligible to vote voting, is so minuscule in this country it's not an issue. In Ohio in 2004 they looked for that and only found 4 out of millions of votes. Yes it could

Why is it that people who don't have any state or federal ID are more likely to vote (D)? I'm really wondering about that.

Illegal immigrants? No sympathy here: if you want to be afforded full citizen rights, you need to do it legally. Immigration sucks? Yes it does, but if you're already not prone to following the laws just getting in, why should anyone believe you're going to follow the laws once you're in? Voting is a right for citizens. If your party is reliant on illegal voting to get a majority,

The ID's required are picture ID's. Most often that is either a drivers license or a passport. Many poor people and people who live in cities with decent public transportation have neither. That is definitely a Democratic leaning demographic.

As people get older they may give up renewing their drivers licenses so they're expired or as in one example I heard about in Indiana a bunch of nuns living in a convent who had been voting for decades were not allowed to vote after Indiana's ID law was passed becaus

Seriously? No ID? As a Canadian, I'm a bit shocked by this. We have to show ID when we vote (or have another ID'd elector in your riding take an oath and vouch for you, but I've never actually seen that happen), and no one bats an eyelash... do I dare ask why this little proceeding is not practiced south of the border?

In the segregation era in the South, there were often poll taxes (nominal fees intended to keep poor whites and all blacks from voting) and literacy tests (white voters might be asked to read the King James Version of John 3:16, black voters to explain the meaning of the Fourth Amendment). For reasons I do not fully understand, the idea that you should have to show identification to vote has become part of this parcel - perhaps because people think that having to have an ID is a poll tax, perhaps because th

For reasons I do not fully understand, the idea that you should have to show identification to vote has become part of this parcel - perhaps because people think that having to have an ID is a poll tax, perhaps because they think that a disproportionate number of black voters will have white poll workers declare "this picture looks nothing like you".

Showing ID requires ID. When the state will give you an ID card for free, then it will no longer be a poll tax. Until then, it is a de facto poll tax, even if that poll tax is $20 every 4 years or some other small number.

I think that having to show ID is a pretty good idea, even if it's not really a major source of fraud.

Why would it be a good idea if it adds an additional burden and doesn't really address fraud? I've never heard of anyone ever going to vote and finding that someone else has already voted in their place. At best, it's about dead people voting, and that's probably why the ID thing is so important to the Republicans, because I keep hearing that the only reason Democrats win in Chicago is that dead people vote there. It seems our politics is so hung up on the past that it never looks forward.

There are millions of American citizens without IDs. Most of them poor, and thus presumed Democrat. That's why the Democratic Party is against requiring IDs and Republicans for it. Neither cares one whit about voter fraud, they just want to make it easier for their supporters to vote and harder for their opposition.

Having to show ID for purchasing liquor is not an unfair tax.
Having to show ID for boarding an airplane is not an unfair tax.
Having to show ID for purchasing firearms is not an unfair tax.
Having to show ID to cross the international border is not an unfair tax.
Having to show ID to get a home loan is not an unfair tax.
Having to show ID to fill a prescription for controlled-substance drugs is not an unfair tax.

How is that doublethink? You have a right to vote. You don't have a right to do any of the other things. Also, you're the only person to use the term "unfair"; that never even entered into it. The term is poll tax, and only showing ID to vote is a poll tax.

I kind of think it does make sense to need ID for voting, but then you should get free ID.

Considering how many states do issue FREE voter ID cards (example: http://www.sos.ga.gov/gaphotoid/FAQ.html [ga.gov]), and how many states have very liberal (in the Locke sense of the word, not the Liberal Party sense) terms of acceptable of non-voter-ID as acceptable proof of identity (anything from driver's licenses to utility bills to welfare cards), all one would need to do is lift a finger, dial a phone number, and get a card.

If you are a new voter who is registering by mail, you will be required to show identification when you go to vote for the first time. If you are already registered at the board of elections or a state agency, you should not have to show identification at the polls. It is advisable for all new voters to bring identification when voting for the first time. Acceptable IDs to to vote are:

Other government documents with your name and address including but not limited to: voter registration card, hunting, fishing, or trapping license or firearm permit.

So, if you work - your paycheck stub is OK. If you work for cash - your bank statement. If you don't work - government check. If you don't work and are in public housing - housing ID card. If you have a landline phone - your bill. If you don't have a landline phone - cell phone bill with matching address. And so on, and so on. Please, PLEASE show me ONE person who can have any semblance of normal function in society and yet somehow avoid having ANY form of ID.

If someone doesn't have ANY form of ID (how the HELL do they live? How do they drive / buy cigarettes / alcohol / drugs? How do they avoid being arrested if stopped by a cop? How do they receive welfare or own a home? Who the HELL in today's society doesn't have ANY ID?), and they're too damn lazy to even call up the state and ask for a voter ID card, do we really need to hold their hand all the way to the voting booth? Or can we acknowledge that sacrificing the rights of hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters (whose vote would be canceled by someone else's fraudulent one) for the sake of a tiny percentage of lazy/arrogant jackasses who can't function on the most basic level, is a terrible idea?

Or do we instead cling to the "screw the rights of millions, protect the rights of the few" doctrine and allow rampant vote fraud to take place?

Poll taxes, fair or otherwise, are illegal. All the rest of those are taxed already (except firearms I think the only one on the list that doesn't necessarily have a tax on it). But that's irrelevant to IDs for voting. For those, you are requiring someone to pay money to vote. It's illegal. If you want to require ID, then provide ID for free and make it accessible (not through the DMV with poor open hours and requiring hours of lines and paperwork)

"As of the 2008 election season, 24 states have voter photo ID laws. If you have a driver’s license, military ID, passport or certain other types of photo ID, you’re all set. If not, these states will provide you with a voter ID card for voting purposes free of charge." (http://www.ehow.com/how_4423238_get-voter-id-card.html)

But no, it's not enough that FREE ID's are provided. We have to deliver them personally,

I seriously doubt that there are millions of American citizens of voting age who do not have IDs. However, make the voter ID cards free. Done.

Why would it be a good idea if it adds an additional burden and doesn't really address fraud?

Because it does address fraud, even if it's a relatively minor form - there are anecdotes of people who have been unable to vote because of it in this very thread. The greater value is that it improves public confidence in the system.

I seriously doubt that there are millions of American citizens of voting age who do not have IDs.

You are right, I should have said "tens of millions". It always amazes me the number of people who argue from a platform of ignorance, usually flaunting it like you did when the first link from the first search I did gave a documented number: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=number+of+americans+without+proof+of+ids&l=1 [lmgtfy.com]> (PDF warning).

The greater value is that it improves public confidence in the system.

You ignorantly questioned "millions." I gave something supporting my statement. You responded with what appears to be "I was wrong and I don't like being wrong, so I'll perform an ad hominem attack and then change the subject."

Millions don't have ID. Millions without ID don't have the paperwork handy that would get them an ID. The number of people who illegally vote is insignificant to the numbers who will have a severe impediment to voting with picture ID required. But that's what the Republicans wan

The ID laws are happening in Republican controlled states. If you spend the time to read the justifications for these laws and the politics of those pushing for them it is clear that the reason for them is voter suppression.

For example the Texas ID law exempts registered gun owners and senior citizens from the ID requirement. Hmmmm I wonder how these folks tend to vote?

For example the Texas ID law exempts registered gun owners and senior citizens from the ID requirement.

Registered gun owners = carry permit.
Senior citizens = AARP card or similar health-related ID.
But somehow, it's not OK to accept those forms of ID (both of which require at least some form of verification), but it's totally cool to show a utility bill or not even show anything at all.
Makes total sense.

What's next, outrage over members of the police and military (who also vote overwhelmingly conservative) who can substitute their police or military ID for other forms of ID? OH MY GOD WE CAN'T HAVE THAT.

Ok, so if any old id will be accepted like AARP cards, why aren't student photo id's being accepted under these laws? Could it be that these here student folks tend to vote liberal? Huh?

And that deal about Acorn? And voter fraud. Complete strawman. Voter fraud in the US is a non-problem. During the last election there were 95 cases of voter fraud brought in the entire United States. Out of an electorate of a hundred of millions.

It is quite obviously voter suppression. All you have to do is look at what IDs

Which is why there needs to be some method of making it provable that a vote is legitimate without violating the anonymity. In other words, the voter and the vote should be non-repudiatable in isolation but no combination of voter with vote should also be non-repudiatable. That's tough, in fact it's the single-toughest problem in the whole e-voting system, which is why I consider it to be the problem that needs to be solved first with all other components built around that solution. Everything else is trivi

Showing ID to vote is silly, showing ID to register to vote so that your appear on the electoral rolls is the only sensible requirement. Quite simply when your name is checked off the electoral rolls it becomes readily apparent when a person's name is checked off twice, which results in an immediate investigation, with serious penalties.

As such in a manual voting system, even wide spread fraud will still number in just the thousands. To actually steal an election you need to corrupt the counting process

Even the idea of having an electronic voting machine is scary. Even a mechanical one. Of course, everything has to be done manually, and watching how the voting and counting process is being done should be granted by constitutional rights (like in France, for example). Not only this: the method to do the manual counting should be written in the stone, because even manually, there are ways to cheat.

In the UK, I neither have to show ID to be on the electoral roll, nor to vote. I was pretty shocked by that - I always take my passport to vote, expecting to be asked to prove who I am, but they let me vote just by telling them my name and address. When I voted in the last election, there were several people on the electoral roll who were no longer resident. They wouldn't have received their polling cards (I know, because I got two of them), so they won't necessarily know to vote. It would have been tri

Any voting machine which is closed source is equal to allowing a magician to count the votes.

First of all there must be a papertrail for any electronic voting machine. While the counting process can be automated, the voting machine should only exist to make voting easier, such as push a button to select a candidate. This should generate a receipt with a unique number representing the digital signature of the person voting. This would make counting easier and would also allow one to vote via the internet whe

Open source is really irrelevant. You can never prove that the voting machine is running an un-altered binary produced from that code on unaltered hardware and with unalterable memory. It's not bad, but it doesn't guarantee anything, so if that's what you think is keeping voting from being equal to a magician counting the votes, then that's a false sense of security you're feeling.

The way you make voting secure is to take the part where you have to trust the machine's memory, with no way for the voter to confirm that its contents are correct -- the magician, essentially -- out of the picture.

Instead, the machine should simply be an enabler for printing a correct ballot. That paper ballot must be the only ballot that matters. That ballot can be machine readable, but it must also be human readable, and it must be the same markings that both human and machines read to determine who the ballot is for.

In this regime, it doesn't matter if the source is open or closed. It doesn't matter if the voting machine is compromised. Because now the "magic" is out in the open, so if the machine tries to pull any tricks, the voter has the ability to actually see that their vote was recorded incorrectly, and not put that ballot in the ballot box.

That's one of a number of possible solutions to the veracity problem. Because there are many solutions to veracity, not all of which are compatible with the many solutions to other parts of the puzzle, it's not useful to focus on that one solution. What you ideally want to do is to start with the bits for which there are provably very few solutions because then you minimize the risk of producing flaws elsewhere by having to leave out parts.

What you ideally want to do is to start with the bits for which there are provably very few solutions because then you minimize the risk of producing flaws elsewhere by having to leave out parts.

I'm not sure I agree with this statement -- given that any security system is only as strong as the weakest link, you need to get it all right (or right enough, anyway), and why not start with the low-hanging fruit? But, regardless of that, I'm interested to hear what you think are the bits that provably have very few solutions, and what you think should be done to address them. It sounds like you've put some thought into it; I'd like to hear it.

Think of it as a SQL statement. If you start with the smallest table and join onto that, both you as a developer/tester and the computer will have the least work to do.

Ok, the smallest solution-space would seem to be to make each ballot unlinkable to a voter and yet be able to prove that the mapping of ballots to votes is a perfect 1:1, that all voters were authorized and that the ballots counted were the ones presented.

This is small because you have veracity of every set and every relationship at the same

Ok, the smallest solution-space would seem to be to make each ballot unlinkable to a voter

I would prefer a system that would link to a voter. This country was founded on open ballots, and vote fraud and intimidation was low until the civil war. I agree it would fail in locations of intimidation, but for a mature democracy like the US, it should be simpler and much more reliable to just go back to a system that didn't require complete anonymity.

I'd like to see voter accountability. If you are not willing to stand up and say 'I agree with this person's principles, I will vote for him,' then I'm not sure that your vote is worth much. On the other hand, this can only work if coupled with strict enforcement of very harsh penalties for voter intimidation. Voter intimidation is an attempt to subvert the government, and needs to be treated as such.

By the way, the scenario that you outline is far more common than it should be with postal votes in the

Voter intimidation could be done now. Cell phone cameras, mail-in (as you mention) and such could already be used. But we don't have that problem in the US. And spending so much effort to make sure we can't make it easier while we are simultaneously pushing for mail in ballots (which open the hole even more explicitly) and such is silly.

Just get over it and bring back open ballots. It'll be simpler, easier, and will eliminate almost all other kinds of fraud instantly (dead people can't vote when you

A voter casts an encrypted ballot in which the key they possess is useless to anyone wishing to find out what the vote was, but where there is one and only one key that can decrypt that ballot and produce a valid record. This requires that you have two machines - the one generating the key pair and the one doing the decryption, where both are tamper-proof, the link is unidirectional and the link is also tamper-proof.

Oh wow, when you said there were other methods to solve the veracity problem, this is not what I thought you meant. I'm sorry, but this is a hard fail.

If we had voting machines which were tamper-proof, and which could be trusted to record the voter's vote reliably, and rigorously obeyed all requirements like "destroy the encryption keys" or "don't change the voter's vote before encrypting it" then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Your whole system falls apart because there is no way for the voter to

Paper is not intrinsically secure. Its important characteristic is that a paper ballot can be audited by any member of the electorate. An electronic vote is only auditable by a small technically-competent subset of the population. If it involves encryption, then less than 1% of the Slashdot-reading population is qualified to audit it, less than 0.01% of the general population. If it's a proprietary solution, then only members of the company that produces it are able to audit it. If you're going to ask

I said nothing about security, I was solely talking about making sure the ballot accurately records the voter's intent. And yes, only paper ballots can ensure that.

Physical security of the ballots once cast is still required, as well as an open counting process, whether you're using electronic voting machines or not, and so is orthogonal to the problem being discussed.

I figured this would be obvious to anyone who thought about it for two seconds. I guess it only takes one second of thought to make a fooli

everything can be easily translated into multiple languages, you can have an audio version for the visually impaired

Not really. Either you then print out the final ballot in their language, which loses some anonymity (you're the only Spanish speaker in an English-speaking district - I wonder who you voted for... ah, now I see). Or you print out the ballot in the English version, and you've gained nothing: how does someone who doesn't read English validate that the machine has really selected the candidate that they voted for? This is even more important if it's a referendum or similar, where the options may be a blob

Accessibility. It's easier to make a handicap-accessible machine than figuring out a way to make filling in little bubbles with a pencil possible for arthritic people, or other handicaps.

Accuracy. The computer can easily enforce rules like "no multi-votes". No more hanging chads, partially filled bubbles, etc. Granted a scan-tron system can just reject a ballot for the voter to fix, but this makes the editing and error feedback all easier.

Why not use semi-electronic voting where you use a pencil and a scantron-type ballot, primary results can be done electronically while there are paper records that can be counted by hand if the results are challenged. It seems to be the best of both worlds, preventing a lot of the flaws of e-voting while still allowing results to be counted quickly, easily and without bias.

You are correct that voters should never be attachable to a vote, but the prior poster is also correct that it is essential that it be provable that the votes counted were the ones cast and that all legitimate votes cast were counted. A sufficiently powerful cryptographic hash (perhaps with sufficient salt from the myriads of identification documents everyone has on file) might work. You have a hash, you can look up to see if the hash is listed amongst the votes counted, but all anyone else could do would e

Why? Vote verification is possible now, and there are no incidents I've heard of it being abused. Open ballots are good enough for the first 100 years or so of the US, ended only because of the Civil War, which, last I heard, is over.

The US was founded on an open ballot had it for 100 years without a problem. It wasn't until a Civil War where the thugs in the south perverted the system. We wouldn't have thugs in the US doing that, even if other locations on the planet may have problems.

I prefer the type where you enter your vote on a touchscreen and get a printout that is duplicated and dropped in a lockbox by the machine itself.

Change it to where the voter drops the one-and-only printout into the lockbox themselves, after verifying that it is correct. Then we're in agreement.

First, because otherwise how does the voter know the printout put in the box is the same as the one they're holding? If we trusted the machine to do that correctly, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Second, because any idea which sacrifices the secret ballot is a horrible idea.

"You will vote for candidate I like, or you're fired"."... or you're going to be beaten up""... or my men will come and rape your wife while you watch it""... [insert method of coercion that you prefer here]"

No they can't. They have to depend on someone, either a trusted friend or an anonymous employee of a voting machine company. It comes down to trust. Would you rather have people trust their friends or corporations? With electronic voting, you're picking option two. That's not a society that I'd like to live in...

This is how CT does it. You bubble in the form, feed it to the machine, and if there's a close race, they pull out all of the paper ballots and recount manually.

Additionally, the state picks a few towns and a few offices at random, and has people from other towns come in and hand count the results to make sure no BS has occurred.

Needless to say, we don't get many claims of election fraud in this state.

I helped with both forms of recount, one where some guy lost by 10 votes, and one random audit. On the recount, the difference between the hand and machine counts was a single vote (which is actually amazing considering how many X'ed the bubble, checked it, or otherwise failed to read the directions). On the audit, the difference was 3 votes. Both left a margin of error of 0.1%, which is pretty damn close to perfect. Multiple recounts may be needed if someone wins by 0.1%, but that's pretty damn rare. (The guy who lost by 10 votes lost by 10/1300ish).

It's really not that hard to keep elections honest, the people just need to demand it, everywhere.

Which, intuitively, means "Use html, but interpret blank lines as paragraph indicators for <p> tags." Which is what "html formatted" means, as far as I can tell. It's been that way for so long, I've kinda stopped thinking about. Used to be you had to select a middle option between html and plain-text to get the "html but with automatic paragraphs" functionality.

Now, let me see... Okay, "extrans (html tags to text)" seems to be just what you'd think "plain old text" would be. And "code", which I w

Okay, not the BitCoin system that is actually used for payment. BitCoin is just an open-source software project, and anyone can create their own BitCoin network. For example, one could be made by a state strictly for use in voting, or Check E. Cheese could use them instead of metal tokens.

I thought part of the design of bitcoin is that it is untracable. Though you have -1 added to your bitcoin total, and +1 is added to the candidate, there is nothing connecting these operations after they happen. I believe this is what the original poster was getting at.

The idea would be to somehow give every person a coin (that may be the tricky part so that every voter gets one and not more or less...). They can then "pay" that coin to who they want elected. There would have to be a modification to bitcoin

I think that the accusation in question is far-fetched, although not impossible, but the important part is that the government are open to this accusation and there is no way for them to defend themselves against it. This undermines the whole democratic process.

It reminds me of a time when we were holding a controversial referendum here in Northern Ireland. One of the parties said that the government would try to throw the outcome of the referendum. The government responded by inviting that party to place t

If you'll read the OP, you'll see that the poster didn't state that politicians could get back doors written into the software, he asserted without proof that they would. All I did was ask what evidence he had for his claim.

The difference is that if there's a backdoor in a proprietary system then you'll never, ever know about it. Seriously though, if you assume that those in power are just outright manipulating the results, then there's no reason they'd need influential developers to sneak a back door into the system and risk someone catching it on a code audit. They could just as easily pay some lackey to break in wherever the machines are being stored and install a new firmware, pay off poll workers to manually edit result

I don't care if they're printed by machine or filled out by hand but the end result should be a paper ballot that can be hand counted if necessary. Anything else is too easily manipulated. I'm not saying paper ballots can't be manipulated but it's far harder with them than with some electronic record.

Who is to say that what gets printed or counted is the same thing the voter marked?

The voter should be able to ensure that what gets printed is what he or she marked.

Ensuring that the ballots are counted as cast is another problem, but one that we know how to solve well enough to ensure that large-scale manipulations of the vote will be found. Once you've got clearly-marked paper ballots that the voter has verified correct, the rest of what follows is well-understood, and your next anti-fraud focus should be on voter registration processes.

I should have been clearer. If the ballot is printed by machine that machine is not counting the ballot, just printing it. The only thing that actually gets counted is the paper ballot that the voter has verified is an accurate reflection of their intention. If you use a scantron or some other machine to count ballots then they should be randomly audited by hand counting to verify that they are accurate.

In the US it varies by state; each state makes its own laws regarding voting machines based on HAVA 2002. NC has a pretty strong law. Getting software changes approved is a long and complicated process.
NC could not get an open source requirement passed in '05. But the compromise that resulted required vendors to supply their source code to a limited set. This was enough to run off the evil Diebold machines; they sued, lost and backed out of the bidding process; as did Sequoia, which was still in business

Even if the software is open sourced how can i ever know that the version running is the one it claims to be ?

I also don't understand how the count can ever be verified without compromising the anonymity of the vote. If you don't trust the system you cannot trust any kind of verification it would do nor any kind of output it would produce (including any paper trail). Does anyone have any insight on the subject ?

Not entirely, but there are steps that can be taken to help insure that non e-votes are counted properly. Those steps are not available for e-voting, and I frankly do not think that the American political system is mature enough to be trusted with it.

I also don't understand how the count can ever be verified without compromising the anonymity of the vote. If you don't trust the system you cannot trust any kind of verification it would do nor any kind of output it would produce (including any paper trail). Does anyone have any insight on the subject ?

The paper trail for a vote should be human-readable, inspected by the voter for correctness before deposit into a secure container at a polling place, and have no content that identifies the voter.

Physical pieces of paper can be physically watched (even shuffled) by multiple parties who are unlikely to collude (e.g. opposing political groups plus the press).

The 'e' part is just to speed counting. The paper makes it possible to handle claims of fraud, bugs, etc.

The computer should print the ballot on paper, you look it over, then it goes into the ballot box. That should be the only form of computer voting allowed. Anything else means you can't see how you voted, and can't see them count the votes- and that means you can't trust it. It doesn't make any difference what kind of government you have if you have no say in it, or can't trust that you do.

What makes vote tabulation trustworthy is having multiple, independently-reported tallies stored in multiple formats. Just like balancing a checkbook (remember that?), the key is getting agreement on the numbers from more than one source.

For example, in the state of Virginia where I am a poll worker, we count the number of people who have been allowed to vote, and we count the number of votes cast on the machines. Each hour, we compare the two numbers, and call them into the Registrar who records them in

There is one major issue with allowing voter to check what his personal vote was outside poll station. Coercion.

Specifically it means that whoever is coercing voters can check who/what they voted for. The current system is designed not to allow this for a reason.

On the other hand if verification you suggest doesn't show what voter voted for, what assurances does voter actually have that his vote didn't get changed to whatever people who are falsifying the ballot want it to be?

Your confidence in the efficacy of paper is misplaced. As paper is physically harder to manage, there are more opportunities for error, and thus _less_ reliable results. It's like the difference between doing your accounting with paper records and hand-written ledger books vs. using a software app.

The digital verification I'm thinking of would show the vote, but nothing about the voter, thus coercion is not possible. The verification would also take place after t

It's called a pencil and a printed piece of paper with the candidates on.

This is the system used in the UK and a lot of other countries in the world. It can't be hacked, it is fully human readable, and it is completely transparent so any attempts to hack it immediately become obvious.

The election results are typically known beyond doubt within less than 24 hours of the poll closing, and the final results are typically declared within a day or two.

Different threat models. The threat model for e-banking is that someone will steal your money, which you can independently audit. The threat model for e-voting is that someone will steal your vote, which you cannot independently audit.

It would be nice if the problem was with technology. However, real life doesn't work like this. For every wide-eyed idealist, there's a hundred Timothy Geithners (tax cheat), Charles Rangel (40 years' worth of tax abuses), and Anthony Wieners (do I really need to explain this one?), who will do everything and anything to gain as much power, money, and prestige as they can - the "small people" be damned.

It's unfortunate, but that's how it is. And it's not likely to change, for several reasons which would m

I'd rather have an "embarrassment" (why an embarrassment? because the media say it's so, and logical analysis of facts goes out the window?) who actually made a decision once in her life, than a nobody-nothing whose experience is a big fat zero.

It's stretching the facts pretty hard to make them fit her account of Paul Revere's ride. His purpose was to warn the locals about the advance of the British. Do you think he allowed himself to be captured just to warn the them? I think he would have rather finished the ride to warn Hamilton and Adams?

She's not even smart enough to get out of jury duty as so many comment on here at/. when the subject comes up. If she was really into the bus tour there's no doubt she could have got it deferred.

You're taking "his purpose" to mean "his *one and only* purpose". Read what the professor says. I can't delineate it any more clearly.

Re jury duty: has it ever occurred to you that some people actually do take their civic duty seriously? Alternately (and probably more realistically), if the media was watching your every move, would you want to risk skipping jury duty and then having headlines like "STUPID SARAH JUMPS JURY DUTY" splashed across every front page?

Publicity hounds... in the immortal words of Winnie The Pooh - "Tigga Please".

Who initiated a FOIA request resulting in 24,000 pages of E-mails disclosed? Who then admitted that while there was nothing specific they could even conjure up that they were looking for, they were "sure" that they'd find "something" (yeah, that's going to be unbiased reporting... at its finest), the project is so huge, but they're so committed to finding something, anything, that they don't have the staff and would like their r

The verification of your right to vote should happen when you register to vote. If anyone anywhere could point to any serious voter fraud by people ineligible to vote in the last 20 years they'd get my attention. I've followed the subject fairly closely ever since 2000 and I've never seen anything other than one-zy/two-zy voter fraud and most of that by Republicans.